The Dead Hamlets: Book Two of the Book of Cross by Peter Roman Read Free Book Online

to any of the apparitions. I’d tried that in the past, but they’d always ignored me and just kept on doing whatever it was they were doing. It was always the same thing: Anne wandering with her head, the soldier looking for whatever it was he was looking for, the children chasing something I could never see. And all the others doing their own thing. They weren’t like other ghosts. They didn’t see the world around them and carry on conversations with the living. They didn’t take on real form and bump into walls or pick up swords or do any of the other things ghosts sometimes did. They were trapped in their memories.
    Or maybe they were trapped in the memories of the Tower itself. That sometimes happens with important places. They develop a sort of life of their own and the memories of what happened there just won’t fade away. Those memories can be so strong that the souls of the people who die there can’t escape them and have to relive those memories forever. That’s why I tend to avoid places like Auschwitz and Gettysburg, if I can help it.
    Well, there were always worse fates than being trapped in the memory of the Tower of London. Just trust me on that.
    Besides, the people I saw here meant nothing to me because they were all dead and long gone, and none of them could help me now. I pulled the blanket over my head and settled into my own memories.

TO SLEEP,
PERCHANCE TO DREAM
    I dreamed of a simpler life. I dreamed I was with Penelope, my dead love, and Amelia, my dead daughter, in a house in the suburbs. It was the same house where I’d once found a demon pretending to be a normal man, raising a family. I’ll leave that detail for you to analyze.
    The thing about this dream was Penelope and Amelia were alive in it. Amelia was young, maybe five or six. The child I never got to have.
    Penelope and I walked Amelia to school in the morning and then made love in our bedroom in the afternoon. I drifted off to sleep after and woke to Penelope standing beside me, dropping cherry blossom petals on my naked body. She had a smile on her face like she knew this was a dream and that our time together was limited. I pulled her back down to me, and we made love again among the petals. That night, I read fairy tales to Amelia in her bed. They were the ones that the Brothers Grimm had lost in the flood that ruined most of their records. Then we slept the sleep of the peaceful and the mortal. In the morning I woke to the smell of bacon and coffee. I opened my eyes as Penelope came into the bedroom with breakfast in bed.
    Only it wasn’t Penelope holding the tray of food. It was Morgana.
    “Wake up, my pet,” she said. “There is a mystery to be solved.” She looked down at the tray and frowned. “Really? This is what you dream about?” she asked. She shook her head and tossed the tray into a corner. “Humans. You are all so dull and predictable.”
    I threw myself to my feet and went past her, down the hall to Amelia’s room. I opened the door to find her gone. The books I’d read to her were scattered on her torn sheets. The pages that were open were blank now.
    “You won’t find her there,” Morgana said behind me. “You won’t find her anywhere.”
    “Leave her out of this,” I said, staring at the empty bed. “She’s done you no harm.”
    “I can’t leave her out of this,” she said. She walked past me, into Amelia’s bedroom. She picked up a brown stuffed bear and smiled at it. Then she plucked out one of its eyes and ate it like a candy. “She is your only reason to live now.”
    “This is about us, isn’t it?” I said. “You’re trying to get back at me for all those things I’ve done to you over the ages.”
    “I have gotten back at you,” she said. “I own even your dreams now.” She popped out the bear’s other eye and ate it.
    “If anything happens to her. . . .” I said. I didn’t know how to finish it. Amelia was all I had left of Penelope now.
    “If anything happens to